For the Love of Words

By Betsy James
Issue 145, November/December 2007

Meadowlark nestlings learn the songs they have heard their parents sing while still in the shell. Orca babies learn the dialects of their adult pod. Human babies pick up their parents' speech. But it wasn't our mom's Brooklynese or our dad's L.A. Spanish that the three James kids caught in the nest. It was their love of words. And because they took it for granted that writing was just another way to speak, we learned to write the way we learned to talk: by using it to say how we felt, what we wanted, what was funny and interesting and real.

Long before we intelligent primates had alphabets, we had lullabies and circle games and, I do not doubt, some forerunner of the awful limerick. Because writing begins with the sung and spoken word, its foundations are laid effortlessly when parents engage in wordplay themselves. Our mother, long a camp counselor, was a walking compendium of little recitations.

I-i-i-into the woods went the bear.
I-i-i-into the woods went Algy.
O-o-o-out of the woods came the bear...
And the bear was bulgy...
And the bulge was Algy.

We grew up chanting nursery rhymes, hand slaps, jump-rope ditties. We punned, learning early that the bun is the lowest form of wheat, and the limerick (thank you, Edward Lear) the lowest form of verse. Mom could recite Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" right through, and when we were sick she lulled us to sleep with it. Given the era's usual round of chicken pox, mumps, measles, and bronchitis, I could chant it along with her by the time I was nine. And of course we did "Jabberwocky."

Like meadowlark nestlings, we sang with our parents all the time: camp songs, folk songs, school songs, church songs, and dubious lyrics from Mom's days as a biology grad student. I'm sure we were the only kids in Utah who sang about zygotes.

Raffi this stuff was not. We wailed the "St. James Infirmary Blues":

I went down to the Saint James Infirmary
For to see my baby there,
She was laid out on a table,
So white, so cold, so fair.

"Inappropriate for children" was the family norm. We ate it up. I searched the public library for numbers by my favorite songwriter, some guy called Anonymous—weird name, but he wrote fantastic stuff.

And of course we talked, talked, talked.

Surrounded by song and gab, it was only a step to wanting to write it down. How could we not, when the house was full of books? Books in homemade bookcases, books in the living room and bedrooms and basement, books on the kitchen table and the coffee table, under the covers with a flashlight, and in the john. Great Books, kids' books, cookbooks, books about poetry and flatworms and dinosaurs and rockhounding and fairy tales and how to fix your truck. Books as furniture. Library books. Books read and reread.

There was a family book conspiracy. Every birthday brought several. Early on, our grandparents established a "Book Club" among the eight cousins: Once a month, round robin, one of us could buy our most coveted volume. We each had our own bookcase. We were library brats too, of course, but when it comes to a favorite book, there's nothing like writing your name in it, in the painful cursive you're just getting a handle on.

I swear, people left books on our doorstep in baskets with "Please take care of my baby" pinned to their little shirtfronts. They must have. How else could we have gotten so many books? We knew where books came from long before we knew where babies came from. (Though we learned about babies early. Mom being a biologist, there were reference books on kid-height shelves—explicit, but not what you'd call riveting.) We saw our mom and dad writing letters, papers, even parts of books. It was easy to assume that writing was something that people we liked liked to do, a coveted grown-up skill. We wanted to do it ourselves.